God in the Quad

A don defends the Supreme Being from the new atheists.

Nothing more clearly shows that atheism belongs to religious belief, as the candlesnuffer does to the candle, than the rise of the so-called “new atheism.” In recent years, a resurgent evangelical Christianity, marked by Biblical literalism, belief in a “personal God,” hostility to scientific rationality and progress, and a deeply conservative politics, has, strangely enough, been contested by a resurgent atheism, marked by its own kind of Biblical literalism, hostility to faith in a personal God, a deep belief in scientific rationality and progress, and, typically, a committed liberal politics.

Atheism is structurally related to the belief it negates, and is necessarily a kind of rival belief; indifferent agnosticism would be a truer liberation. For Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, among others, the God most worth fighting against seems to be a hybrid of a cheaply understood Old Testament, a prejudicially scanned Koran, and the sentimentalities of contemporary evangelicalism: He created the world, controls our destinies, resides in Heaven, loves us when He is not punishing us, intervenes to perform miracles, sent His only son to die on the Cross and save us from sin, and promises Heaven for the devout. This God is not very Judaic, or very philosophical: He is not the bodiless and indescribable entity that Maimonides or Aquinas ceaselessly circumnavigates, or the slightly chilly and unapproachable divinity one finds in the work of the Protestant theologian Karl Barth. Nor is He the Buddha. Hinduism is mentioned only when it is fundamentalist—when it approximates monotheistic literalism.

For the new atheists, as for many contemporary American Christians, faith is assumed to be blind—an irrational closing of the eyes to evidence and reason, a leap of faith into an infinite idiocy. The new atheists do not speak to the millions of people whose form of religion is far from the embodied certainties of contemporary literalism, and who aren’t inclined to submit to the mad mullahs and the fanatical ministers. Indeed, it is a settled assumption of this kind of atheism that there are no intelligent religious believers (the philosopher Daniel Dennett has advocated that non-believers call themselves “brights”—the better, I suppose, to contrast with dullard philosophers like Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, or the late Leszek Kolakowski), and that any working scientist who professes to believe in God is probably lying, or is distinctly subpar. Darwinism is presumed to invalidate any religious belief, despite Stephen Jay Gould’s concession that “either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs.” (As the non-believing son of an academic zoologist who became a priest in late middle age, and practiced both professions, I am inclined to think that Gould had a point.)

Since belief in God is clearly madness or weakness, the new atheists must scrabble around for quasi-biological explanations of this stubborn malady. Human beings, for instance, apparently have very good “simulation software” in their brains, and this encourages them to invent religious and visionary experiences. Both Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins like to talk about our mental HADD, or Hyperactive Agent Detection Device, whereby “we hyperactively detect agents where there are none, and this makes us suspect malice or benignity where, in fact, nature is only indifferent.” Thus we convince ourselves that God sends us a tsunami in anger, or a pay raise in blessing. In Dawkins’s popular book “The God Delusion,” he reaches into the archives of “Fawlty Towers” to explain HADD. Think, he says, of John Cleese getting out of his car, which has just broken down, and manically hitting it, blaming it for its uselessness. That is the great illusion of religious belief: we have been HADD.

But the Oxonian guffaw backfires. For one thing, the car is not a piece of indifferent nature. It is man-made, and so to assume a causal, if rather obscure, link between human agency and the car’s breakdown isn’t insane—surely, sometime in the nineteen-eighties, Dawkins owned a badly made English car? And, whether you believe in God or not, the history of that belief is our history. The God that J. S. Bach believed in is greater than John Cleese’s car because nobody wrote the St. Matthew Passion or the B-Minor Mass—narratives as well as musical compositions—about that car. Even if the European cathedrals are monuments to an illusion, the illusion is, at the very least, a large and awful one, and the monuments tragically impressive.

What is intended to be an insult to the varieties of religious experience is also an unintended insult to the varieties of secular experience. When the pianist Andras Schiff says, as he did recently, that, while Beethoven is human, “Mozart was sent from Heaven, he’s not one of us,” is he merely making use of a post-religious language, or is an actually religious language using him? Abolishing the category of the religious robs non-believers of some surplus of the inexpressible; it forbids the contrails of uncertainty to pass over our lives. What is most repellent about the new atheism is its intolerant certainty; it is always noon in Dawkins’s world, and the sun of science and liberal positivism is shining brassily, casting no shadows.

Oddly, despite God’s general discrediting, theology is thriving. Serious theological argument is being done by literary and cultural theorists like Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Zizek, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou. Of these men, Terry Eagleton is probably the only one to profess formal religious belief, but the others share a sophisticated relation to their unbelief. Eagleton’s “Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate” (Yale; $25), attacks the new atheism as a kind of secular counter-fundamentalism, reserving special scorn for its unrefined notion of God—“the primitive, Philip Pullman-like view of those who cannot wean themselves off the idea of God as Big Daddy.” It makes a sharp, limited case against Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens—concertinaed by Eagleton into the unappealing compound “Ditchkins” (a very drab English town?)—better than any previous book of its kind has. But its own incoherence is symptomatic of the frailty of what might be called the new anti-atheism.

Terry Eagleton is a Marxist Catholic literary theorist, who taught English for many years at Oxford. His Catholicism used to be obscured by his Marxism, but, as he has aged, his religiousness, like a limp, has become more pronounced. Some might say that to be committed to not one but two questionable orthodoxies is to be symmetrically hobbled, but Eagleton’s Marxism is vividly cogent, while his Christianity is militantly opaque. In his new book, he writes wittily about arriving at Cambridge University in the nineteen-sixties and discovering a politically radical Catholicism, which he stumbled upon “with the aid of a few maverick Dominicans and rather more pints of bitter.” As he explains, this supposedly new theology went back to Thomas Aquinas, who “did not see God the Creator as some kind of mega-manufacturer or cosmic chief executive officer, as the Richard Dawkins school of nineteenth-century liberal rationalism tends to imagine.”

For Aquinas in his Aristotelian mood, God is far more abstract and impersonal than, say, Joel Osteen’s favorite Intercessor. He is what Aquinas humbly calls “the First Efficient Cause of things.” He is not even what we imagine as the Genesis Creator, because Aquinas thought that it did not particularly matter in what order God created things. But this bodiless entity outside our universe sustains our existence; He is, in Eagleton’s words, “the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever. Not being any sort of entity himself, however, he is not to be reckoned up alongside these things, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.” Accordingly, Aquinas believed that we can talk about God only indirectly, through analogy. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who influenced Aquinas, took a severer line, and argued that it was impossible to know God by assigning Him human attributes. “Silence is praise to Thee,” Maimonides wrote, quoting from Psalm 65. (Melville does an ironic version of this theology in “Moby-Dick,” whereby the white whale is bombarded with masses of descriptions, and freighted with allegory, but remains gigantically unknowable.)

For Maimonides, as for Aquinas, God is not needily parental, like the evangelical model, but superbly self-sufficient. God “fashioned us just for the fun of it—he is not neurotically possessive of us,” Eagleton writes. “Unlike George Bush, God is not an interventionist kind of ruler.” He is the power that allows us to be ourselves; He is “pure liberty.” Eagleton shows little interest in the central claim of Christian belief, that Christ was God incarnate, sent to earth to die for our sins and to secure us eternal tenure in Heaven. Jesus is less important to him as the Son of God (if, indeed, he was that) than as a proto-Marxist. Salvation is not so much about saving our souls as “a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich.” We are saved, he writes, “not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another.” Heaven is not really about a world to come but about the transformation of the world we have: “Only by a readiness to abandon our dished-up world can we live in the hope of a more authentic existence in the future.” Jesus is an example, a symbol: “The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains.”

An eloquent defender of the necessary relevance of the Gospel message, Eagleton concludes his book by discussing progressive and charitable religious activity (he mentions the resistance of the Buddhist monks in Burma); taking a swipe or two at scientific rationalism (the Apocalypse, if it ever comes, is “far more likely to be the upshot of technology than the work of the Almighty”); and savaging the kind of liberal Enlightenment that Dawkins and Hitchens defend so vehemently. The two English atheists are politically complacent, Eagleton charges, in proportion to their lack of faith in faith itself. By contrast, he is a socialist for the same reason that he is a socialist Christian; he still has faith that the world is radically improvable. He writes:

It is also because one cannot accept that this—the world we see groaning in agony around us—is the only way things could be, though empirically speaking this might certainly prove to be the case; because one gazes with wondering bemusement on those hard-headed types for whom all this, given a reformist tweak or two, is as good as it gets; because to back down from this vision would be to betray what one feels are the most precious powers and capacities of human beings; because however hard one tries, one simply cannot shake off the primitive conviction that this is not how it is supposed to be.

It’s easier to disagree with Eagleton’s political solutions than with his political diagnosis. Humanity, as Cardinal Newman put it, is “implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity.” It is not Eagleton’s radical politics that bewilders but his radical Christianity, and, in the end, his shiftiness about his religious belief has the remarkable effect of pushing the reader back onto the stout deck of the dreadnought Ditchkins.

To begin—and end—with, it is never clear what degree of divine authority Eagleton grants Christ’s mission on earth. At one moment, he airily writes that though the account he has given of his own Christian belief “may not be true, it is not, in my opinion, stupid, vicious, or absurd. And if it evokes no response from Ditchkins at all, then I think his life is the poorer. . . . But even if the account I have given of it is not literally true, it may still serve as an allegory of our political and historical condition.” Of course, the truth claims of religious belief are precisely what the new atheists so loudly dispute. If all Eagleton can now say to them is that their lives are the “poorer” for not responding to a moving “political and historical” allegory, he is just being finely sentimental. He might as well have written a book about Anton Chekhov or Walter Benjamin. Yet, eighty or so pages later, he is serenely discussing the way that religious faith is not the same as empirical knowledge. He has an analogy. No one has seen the unconscious, he argues, yet “many people believe in its existence, on the grounds that it makes excellent sense of their experience in the world.” Religious faith is like that. The question of faith and knowledge, he says, “is a good deal more complex than the rationalist suspects.” Then comes this concession:

None of this is to suggest, as Dawkins seems to suspect, that religious claims require no evidence to back them up, or that they merely express “poetic” or subjective truths. If Jesus’s body is mingled with the dust of Palestine, Christian faith is in vain.

At the same time, he cautions, in matters of faith “the evidence by itself will not decide the issue.”

But to say that Christian faith is in vain if Jesus’ body is mingled with the dust of Palestine is to provide a case in which evidence by itself would decide the issue—it would nullify faith, which is just what St. Paul meant when he said that, if the Resurrection never happened, then, of all people, Christians are the most pitiable. The theologian Herbert McCabe, one of the “maverick Dominicans” who influenced Eagleton, writes in his book “God Matters” (1987) that “a historical discovery that Jesus never lived would invalidate pretty well all Christian doctrine,” as would “an archaeological discovery that the body of Jesus rotted away in Palestine.” To him, it is “essential to the Catholic tradition that the resurrection of Christ is bodily; that is to say that it is Christ himself, this human bodily being who is risen.” This is forthright and plausible. But Eagleton prefers to leave his position on the matter altogether cloudy.

The revolutionary Jesus who wanted to help the poor is easy enough to believe in. But if Jesus really was God incarnate it becomes harder for Eagleton to mobilize, against Dawkins and Hitchens, his Thomistic God—bodiless as vapor, distant, sublimely indifferent. If God is such a ghostly and un-needy entity, why did he send his son to save us? That seems rather . . . involved of Him, no?

Eagleton recoils from the idolatrously human appropriations of the televangelist or the mullah. (“God wants you to make more money!” “God hates the infidel!”) But Christianity is a form of idolatry. Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook? Yes, thou canst: God emerges from the whirlwind and reveals a highly personalized version of Himself in His incarnated son. Christians tend to apprehend God through His revelation in Jesus, and feel quite happy to talk about God’s sacrificial loving-kindness, His mercy, His gentleness, His power to move mountains and heal wounds, His ability to number every hair on our heads—and, by implication, to help us get our next job or save Aunt Jane from cancer. (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their book “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” blame this idolatry of the man-God for Christian anti-Semitism. For them, the Incarnation brings the absolute closer to the finite, and makes the finite absolute; it turns spirit into fleshy magic.) Indeed, the Princeton philosopher Mark Johnston argues, in a suggestive and cunning new book, “Saving God” (Princeton; $24.95), that most religious belief is idolatrous. The very notion of a supernaturalist creed, with its devoted faith in the permanent solutions of the afterlife, is, to Johnston’s way of thinking, idolatrous—it is the forcing of God (whom he calls “the Highest One”) into the role of ally and patron, instead of letting God appear as “the wholly Other, the numinous One who transcends anything that we can master by way of our own efforts.”

Johnston is humane, and philosophically nimble, but his rarefied and almost scholastic definition of the ideally non-idolatrous God is not obviously very helpful to anyone but a rarefied scholastic: “The Highest One = the Outpouring of Existence Itself by way of its exemplification in ordinary existents for the sake of the self-disclosure of Existence Itself.” As he concedes, idolatry is a natural human impulse. In daily religious life, God is always being laden with human attributes. Even Eagleton glues whatever human qualities seem most desirable onto his apparently impersonal God. This deity, he says, is not “a celestial engineer . . . but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view.” He made the world as a gift, as pure superfluity, Eagleton says, and may indeed have long ago “bitterly regretted” doing so. God “hates burnt offerings and acts of smug self-righteousness, is the enemy of idols, fetishes, and graven images of all kinds—gods, churches, ritual sacrifice, the Stars and Stripes.” Well, how convenient. Quite apart from the awkward fact that the God of the Hebrew Bible clearly enjoys the right kind of burnt offerings (after the flood, Noah’s smelled particularly agreeable to Him), one wonders how Eagleton can possibly know that his spectral and not-of-this-world God is also an unneurotic aesthete who may regret His creation, and dislikes the Stars and Stripes. This is just idolatry posing as anti-idolatry.

The Christian God is personal—that is precisely the stumbling block for many of us who cannot persist in belief. And how does one go from the idolatryhating God of the Old Testament to the fleshily incarnated God who died on the Cross? The bridge between the two seems not to stretch all the way across the river. This dilemma must be still more acute for Terry Eagleton, whose idea of God is not even Yahweh, the capricious, meddling reality of the Hebrew Bible, but an aristocratic philosophical vapor. How did a vapor birth a son? The obvious solution is to downplay Christian idolatry. God’s embarrassing Incarnation as Jesus must just be switched off, as you might hastily turn off the kids’ TV when your parents arrive for dinner.

If, on the other hand, the Gospel story is mere political allegory, it no longer has any power to command belief; Christ’s imperatives dribble into the dust of Palestine. Eagleton finds an inspiring model in Jesus, but someone else might prefer Oprah. And the Jesus who was the son of God is not only the inspiring political revolutionary of the Sermon on the Mount (the rabble-rouser of Pasolini’s great film “The Gospel According to St. Matthew”) but the imperious theological commander who tells a puzzled Nicodemus that, unless he is born again in spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.

This is the point at which modern quasi-believers like Eagleton turn to the philosopher Wittgenstein, who spoke of religion as a form of life. Religion, Wittgenstein thought, is a matter not of holding certain propositions (as in, say, “I believe that Christ sits in Heaven at the right hand of God”) but of inhabiting certain religious practices (charitable activity, turning the other cheek, playing the organ in church). One of his examples is of kissing the picture of a loved one. This is not based on a belief that it will have an effect on the person represented, he says; we do it because it satisfies us. Wittgenstein is useful to those who remain attached to the traditions of their upbringing but no longer credit any of the tradition’s truth claims. He gets people like Eagleton off the hook of belief. Religion becomes an embedded experience, a structure of feeling. Eagleton follows Wittgenstein when he criticizes Hitchens and Dawkins for their literalist notion of religious belief. There is a more complicated, more unconscious kind of belief, Eagleton insists. “God does not ‘exist’ as an entity in the world,” he writes. This kind of faith is “not primarily a belief that something or someone exists, but a commitment and allegiance—faith in something.”

Yet is it really the case that religious belief is not propositional, that no one starts or stops believing in God over the terrible hazard of a proposition? Surely, millions of people have drifted away from the religion of their forebears after consideration of such matters as the problem of evil, the unreliability of Biblical accounts, the silence or absence of God, the uselessness of petitionary prayer. These are certainly embedded experiences—they are experiences of the failure of certain religious propositions. One assumes that Hitchens and Dawkins, as young men, made their journeys along such dusty routes. A posthumous publication by the political philosopher John Rawls, “A Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin & Faith” (Harvard; $27.95), allows us to see how a very intelligent believer, who once considered the priesthood, lost his Christian faith as a young man. Rawls fought in the Army during the Second World War, and a brief memoir in the new book, written five years before his death, recounts three occurrences from that time. One day, a Lutheran pastor gave a sermon in which he claimed that God “aimed our bullets at the Japanese while God protected us from theirs.” This infuriated Rawls, for whom these were simply “falsehoods about divine providence.” The second event was the death of a friend in battle. The third event elapsed over several months: the dissemination of the news of what had happened in the death camps. Rawls’s faith was shaken. He began to question whether prayer was possible: “How could I pray and ask God to help me, or my family, or my country, or any other cherished thing I cared about, when God would not save millions of Jews from Hitler?” To interpret history as expressing God’s will, Rawls says, “God’s will must accord with the most basic ideas of justice as we know them. For what else can the most basic justice be? Thus, I soon came to reject the idea of the supremacy of the divine will as also hideous and evil.”

This familiar recoil from belief—it has the typicality of a case study—is surely as propositional as it is performative. Daily religious belief is full of such implied propositions (e.g., “God is just”; “God saves my soul”; “Christ was God made man”). It is no good for Eagleton to turn on Rawls and say, in effect, “But I don’t mean your kind of belief in God, or even your kind of God; I mean something much more sophisticated and ethereal. There is really no such thing as what you call ‘the supremacy of the divine will,’ because God doesn’t ‘exist’ as an entity in the world.” Theologians and priests are always changing the game in this way. They accuse atheists of wanting to murder an overliteral God, while they themselves keep alive a rarefied God whom no one, other than them, actually believes in. (Years ago, the Anglican bishop of Durham, formerly a liberal professor of theology, caused a scandal when he seemed to refer to the Resurrection as “a conjuring trick with bones.” He was talking like a professor, not like a pastor, apparently unaware that many believers expect their bishops to believe the basic doctrines.) They denigrate ordinary belief as a set of benighted misconceptions, while, out of the other side of their mouth, they can praise ordinary belief as a set of non-propositional practices. (“It’s not about the proposition that the resurrection happened so much as about doing good, preparing the flowers at church, kissing icons, and so on.”) Sure enough, Eagleton engages in this dialectical chicanery, too. He can do so because Christ’s divinity seems to have no palpable value for him. That is why the word “prayer” does not occur in his book. Prayer is a practice (a private and public ritual) and a proposition (the proposition that God exists and hears me).

If the new atheism offers an inadequate account of the varieties of religious experience, so does its most vigorous critic, Eagleton, because the kind of religious experience he approves of turns out to be barely religious at all. Both Eagleton and the new atheists have, finally, an incomprehension of the actual faith that people lead their lives by, the idolatrous forcing and appropriating of God, the desperate and faithful submission to divine will and succor. I am talking here not of evangelicalism or fundamentalism but merely of the divine assistance that millions daily request and daily picture in variously literal forms. For both sides, this kind of belief is seen as intellectually primitive.

What is needed is neither the overweening rationalist atheism of a Dawkins nor the rarefied religious belief of an Eagleton but a theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief. Such atheism, only a semitone from faith, would be, like musical dissonance, the more acute for its proximity. It could give a brother’s account of belief, rather than treat it as some unwanted impoverished relative. It would be unafraid to credit the immense allure of religious tradition, but at the same time it would be ready to argue that the abstract God of the philosophers and the theologians is no more probable than the idolatrous God of the fundamentalists, makes no better sense of the fallen world, and is certainly no more likable or worthy of our worshipful respect—alas. ♦

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